


Scenes from a Lifeboat

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [14]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Impeachment, M/M, Sickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:00:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21999388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: These finicky human bodies and brains understand so little, but they have to exist here, now.They have to.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273
Comments: 16
Kudos: 61





	Scenes from a Lifeboat

“Honestly, it’s better this way,” he says aloud to himself in the last moments of clarity, before the fever catches hold in his fingertips and fries its way up his nerves and into his brain. 

“You okay, man?” a stranger asks as Enjolras jostles past, still muttering.

“Been better.” He hops off the bus. No, “hops” is too jaunty. “Topples,” though, or “staggers,” sounds theatrically overblown. He just was on the bus and now is not, and the gray wintry world is swimmy around him. Good thing home’s just a couple blocks away.

*

It _is_ better. He’s home, there are boxes of tissues and thick warm sleep clothes and he can just stand and lean on the counter, gaze locked somewhere in the middle distance, while Grantaire boils water.

“You sound awful.”

“I’ve been better.”

“Want whiskey in this?” Grantaire’s squeezing half a lemon into a mug. 

“Do I?” Enjolras’s eyes want to close, or to sink down into his sinuses and drain out onto the floor. 

Grantaire gets whiskey from the cupboard. Enjolras’s eyes might be closed. He hears it, though, the splash, then the tumbling-in of the water. There’s a sudden warm wafting smell of lemon and alcohol. 

“Go lie down,” Grantaire says, laughing. “Babe. You’re fucked.”

*

Everyone is terrible. It’s really so much better he’s not there. Here, he can mute the screen and watch the dummies parade through, one mendacious weasel after the next getting up to yell that god damn it, they _make_ the laws so they know better than anyone that following the dictates of the Constitution is actually the least fucking Constitutional thing you can do. 

Even with the anger prickling under his skin, he feels like that skin weighs a million pounds, every inch of it sensitive and itchy and uncomfortable and exhausting to wear upon himself. He falls asleep for a little bit. 

When he wakes up, it’s some time later. Outside, rain slices across the windows. He should see if it’s puddling by that one window how it sometimes does when the rain comes down sideways like this, but god, getting up sounds incomprehensibly difficult.

Instead, he hauls up one of his arms to forage among the couch pillows for his phone. 

It’s been on silent, and good thing, because the senator’s staff’s group chat has _comments_. They’re all watching in their respective offices while they manage the unrelenting demands of a jittery populace.

 **Chida:** Did I hear that right?

 **Chida:** Did the Gentleman from GA really just state, as a defense, that he and 63 mil other americans voted in this pres to “raise a collective political middle finger to DC”?

 **Aiden:** A compelling argument

 **Aiden:** How dare you hate on us—we came here to hate on you

 **Darren:** We thought of it first. And also, one more time for the folks in the cheap seats, fuck all y’all

 **Celia:** Hope the Speaker finds a way to work in an “I’m rubber you’re glue” 

**Darren:**...and Enjolras, that’s your cue

 **Aiden:** Enjolras is sick

 **Darren:** Oh no

 **Darren:** Chida said, but come on, he’s working anyway isn’t he?

 **Celia:** He was going to fly back to D.C. today

 **Aiden:** Right, he called to have me reschedule his flight. Sorry. You were in that meeting

 **Chida:** Haven’t seen him online today

The phone rings. Enjolras watches it for a moment, confused; a silent phone ringing is a strange thing; of course calling someone doesn’t require noise, but the word “ring” certainly suggests it, and—

He swipes his finger across the screen to accept the call.

“Hi babe.”

“Hi.”

“You doing okay?”

“I guess. I don’t like the way it feels to be in my body right now.”

Grantaire laughs.

“I just _slept_ in the _daytime_.”

He laughs more. It is loud and good, a warming kind of sound. “Listen, can you stay awake for a little bit? There’s going to be someone coming with food for you.”

“Okay.” Food feels like an unnecessary abstraction. All he needs is for his body to stop fighting itself.

“Sorry I can’t be home right now. I’m taking tomorrow off, though, okay?”

“You don’t need to be here.”

“I want to.”

“I’ll just get you sick again. You haven’t let me live down last time.”

“I gotta go. Love you.”

He does not stay awake. The doorbell jolts him out of a strange, strobe-lit dream. A person he does not know hands him a bag. “Thanks,” he says, and she is walking away.

The bag holds tubs of ramen, still hot enough that the broth sends up steamy clouds when he pours it over the noodles, and it steams up his face and makes it drip even more than it was already dripping—but it is hot and salty and rich and good. He gets halfway through before he has to put it down and collapse back onto the couch.

*

He spends a lot of time barely present in time. Are you really participating in the space-time continuum if you’ve lost track of your physical essence, and if every thought exists at once?

Sometimes there’s one really good sneeze that temporarily clears his airways and his mind, but just as he’s trying to piece back together what fragments of earlier thought he can recall, a round of shivers chases them all away again.

Occasionally he is reminded of his body when he has to pee. 

Occasionally he is reminded of consciousness when he wakes up and realizes he must have been asleep.

*

He came back for the blue-jeans show. 

(It wasn’t really about blue jeans, it turned out. Well, it was. But it was about values, about culture, about the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be American: Miners on lunch break. Rosie, riveting. James Dean, leaning. “Venus in blue jeans.” Designer denim. “Wrangler on my booty.”)

The weeknight launch party meant Grantaire had hustled home to change; when he got there, Enjolras was fresh from a shower and about to dress.

Enjolras doesn’t really wear jeans, but he considered it for the show’s opening. “Is that like wearing the band t-shirt to a concert, though?” he asked, holding up the one pair he owns.

Grantaire tilted his head in the pretense of contemplation. “You gonna stick an informational placard on the front? Era, maker, notes of interest?”

“If you haven’t already noted my interest, a placard won’t do much to help.”

“We’re not supposed to be late!”

“Then let’s make it quick,” Enjolras said, stroking himself through his underwear and making Grantaire shake his shaggy head in resignation.

“God, I want to suck you.”

“You should.”

“Just for a minute.”

He did, for just a minute, but then Enjolras reached under R’s museum hoodie to unzip his pants and jam a hand inside. He let his fingers follow the rhythm of Grantaire’s mouth on his cock, fast and light, fast and light, then slow, hard. 

“You’re so good, Grantaire. So good.” Grantaire groaned around his cock, sucking more intensely as his dick started to thrust into Enjolras’s grip. “I don’t want to make you late, you know. I can’t wait to see what you’ve made.” Grantaire groaned louder. “You constantly impress me.”

“Fuck,” R said, pulling back for just a moment. “Talk like that, you’re gonna make me come.”

“Good. Come for me. You want me to come in your mouth, though?” Grantaire’s tongue toyed briefly with the tip, teasing, before he sank back down. “You want to be exchanging pleasantries with top-circle donors knowing you just sucked me dry?”

One of Grantaire’s hands had joined his own on Grantaire’s cock, where his hips were grinding against into their shared grip, and his other hand found its way now, suddenly, eagerly, to Enjolras’s balls. 

“Oh fuck, Grantaire, you want this? You want me to—ohhhh.” His mind rocketed outward, encompassing earth and heavens and a million worlds beyond, and then right back in, to the wet, warm pulsing of Grantaire’s come on their hands.

He wrapped his clean hand around R’s back and held him close. “I love you,” he said, after a moment’s shared breathing. “Let’s go see your show.”

“You’re a monster,” Grantaire said, looking down at his come-spattered belly and hoodie with laughing dismay. 

“Just get in the shower. We’ll be ready in no time.”

R was quick in the shower, but Enjolras was quicker. 

He wore a suit, gray. A suit is so easy. You don’t have to spend any time thinking what pieces go together.

The show was great. Grantaire is so good at seeing the big and the little pieces all at once.

*

“What I don’t get is, how’s a person supposed to pivot? From ‘What I do has to be enough’ to ‘Nothing I do will ever be enough’? 

Grantaire gives no indication of having heard; in the other room, he’s making tea and filling the dishwasher. When he comes back, he sets a cup of hot mint tea in front of Enjolras and says, sitting back with his own mug, “Those are the same thing.”

“I write words, words for one smart and great person to say, but in the end, no matter how right she is, she’s one vote out of a hundred, and it’s just not enough.”

“Never will be.” It’s raining again outside. Grantaire sets his mug on a little table so he can go adjust the garbage pail he’s placed under the leaky corner of the window. Enjolras usually forgets until he comes home to a puddle on the floor, as the stained floorboards attest. “Nothing’s ever one person. What we need? We need to—how’s it go?—we need to ‘ _suffer a sea-change_.’”

“‘ _Into something wild and strange’_?”

On TV, the awful faces keep talking. Grantaire has a long phone call with his mom. He eats something with eggs and peppers in it, and heats leftover soup for Enjolras, who manages to eat a little before he’s out again.

*

He dreams a deluge, cataracts down city streets, thoroughfares flooded and swept away. There must be people—there _are_ , people struggling and swimming, caught in the murky waters that just won’t stop rising. The rain keeps falling, surging over balconies and rooftops, demolishing a normal world that used to seem safe.

Even as he watches his fellow humans falter and drown, he’s thinking ahead to what will happen when these waters recede. What will remain in this devastated landscape, clamoring for regrowth.

He wakes up soaked and shivering. “Rich,” he says aloud to himself in the dark. “Not wild. _Rich and strange_.”

*

Grantaire looks up from his art magazine.

“You okay, babe?”

Enjolras blows his nose aggressively into a wadded, snot-soaked tissue. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m crying? Everything’s just, up to here right now, everything, and... I don’t fucking know. At least there’s this.”

The votes are in. There were no surprises. 

**Celia:** Word’s getting around that there may be some delay in delivering the Articles

 **Chida:** Senator’s been priming her network all week

 **Celia:** So yes? Where do we go from here?

 **Enjolras:** Same damn place we’ve been going

 **Celia:** Enjolras!!!

 **Darren:** Back from the dead!

 **Enjolras:** Just slower

He flings the tissue box to the other end of the couch, where it sticks at an angle in the cushions. “The more we fight for a semblance of legitimacy, the more goddamn legitimate it’s going to look when the Senate shoots the whole thing down.” His mind’s almost his own again. He can construct full sentences. Give it another day or two, and he can finagle them into a shape that fits the senator’s platform and voice.

“This one, at least this one’s not on you.”

“Fuck that.” The sneezes that chase this do nothing to lessen his wrath: it’s on him, on everyone and on him, because there is a rich and strange future ahead if only we can figure out how the fuck to keep everyone alive until it comes.

“I know,” Grantaire says, retrieving the tissue box and handing it back to Enjolras with forbearance so real it looks like nonchalance. “Blow your nose. I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I meant to finish and post this last week, but guess what? I got sick.
> 
> Dear Universe, Don't you trust me to create my own verisimilitude?


End file.
